I was just on the phone speaking with Gerald Baron, who blogs as Crisisblogger. Nobody’s better qualified to write about crisis communication. Gerald wrote the book “Now is Too Late” (about to come out in a second edition that addresses blogs, among other new topics) and started the PIER System, owned by Audience Central, of which Baron is CEO.

Gerald regaled me with the tale of of Michael De Kort, the Lockheed Martin whistleblower who, after failing to get anyone to pay attention using traditional channels, uploaded a video to YouTube to tell his story. De Kort’s viral video appraoach was covered by The Washington Post and Time magazine, among others.

Gerald blogged the story and followed up when Time covered it. But what really blew him away was when De Kort himself commented on Gerald’s post.

It wasn’t the first time Gerald had such an experience. In a July 19 post on the Princess Cruise ship that rolled, Baron analyzed the cruise line’s poor communication. One of the comments to the post began, “Yeah??.I was on the Crown Princess with my husband, and sister in law and brother in law. We thought we were going down.”

I’ve had a few similar experiences on this blog, such as the time Adam Curry responded to a post suggesting that John Edwards was a good choice to keynote Gnomedex, a response to Frank Barnako’s suggestion that Curry or Dave Winer would have been better choices.

Blogs have made the newsmakers a part of the conversation, a considerable step from the days when we heard from them only when reporters pushed microphones in front of their faces. It’s a new dynamic that means, as Gerald put it:

...ever more vigilance is needed. You need eyes on all sides of your heads and not up your backside. What is said in one presumably obscure corner of the vast global conversation can find its way into Time and the front page of newspapers in mere moments.